Page 110 of A Novel Love Story

We collided and held each other tightly, and she started to cry, and I started to cry with her, because things weren’t perfect, and endings weren’t always happy, but it wasn’t always the destination that mattered.

It was this.

Pru and book clubs and burnt hamburgers disguised in hot sauce and poorly attended author events and cheap chardonnay and loud music and summers driving down country roads with the windows rolled down and engagement parties and nights with wine and hot tubs and good books.

It wasn’t the end that mattered, but every word leading up to it.

37

The Montage at the End

WE DROVE HOME THEnext morning with the worst hangover of Pru’s life. I’d, thankfully, already had that at thebeginningof my week, and I think my body had decided that I needed a break from feeling dead. Pru likened it to the night Liam broke off our engagement, but it felt more like a few days ago after girls’ night. When we got home, she posted on social that she and Jasper were engaged, and showed everyone the ring, and told them all how he proposed—

On an iceberg, just as I predicted.

(As it turned out, while Pru flew to New York, he flew home to Atlanta, and paced nervously back and forth in their tiny cottage in Marietta until we rolled back into town.)

A week after we came home from the cabin, Pru asked if I was really okay. “Because, you know”—she hadn’t known what to say, or how to say it—“we were always … we always did everything together.”

“We still do,” I replied. “I’ll always be right here with you for every anniversary,birthday, new house, wedding—whatever. We’re still in this together.”

She cocked her head to the side. We were sitting in the back of Sweetpea, the hatchback open, watchingMamma Mia!at the local drive-in’s “HELLO SUMMER!” movie marathon. “What changed?”

I wished I could tell her—I wanted to—but I knew how my story would sound. Then again, I couldn’t lie to her, either. I couldn’t tell her that romance novels with Fabio on the cover and music playlists featuring Stevie Nicks singing about men who didn’t deserve second chances cured me of whatever hole I had sunk into since Liam. I was still in that hole, to be honest, but I was learning how to grow and nurture some vines to climb out.

“Something happened the week you weren’t at the book club cabin,” Pru went on. “I know you. You’re not telling me something.”

“I doubt you’ll believe me.”

She seemed perplexed. On the screen, all the guys were high-kicking themselves across a pier. “Whenever have I not?”

She had me there.

“What happened?” she asked again.

Everything. Nothing.

I was tired of being stagnant, I thought.I wanted to be a main character in my own life again.

And, deep down, I still missed Eloraton terribly. I would go back to the series, and flip through it sometimes, and smile as Junie stumbled into town, and Ruby fell in love with Jake, and Gemma kissed Thomas under the stars, and Bea rode off into the sunset with a happy for now, only to come home when her adventure ended. I’d pause at the dedication sometimes.

To A. S.

I hoped Anders was all right.

I hoped he found his happy ending.

“Okay,” I said to Pru, “but I warned you. Remember the cases of hot sauce you found in my car?”

“Yeah. It was supposed to be wine. What’s that got to do with anything?” She angled herself toward me and waited patiently. We’d seen this movie a thousand times before, and no one else was within earshot anyway. So, I took out another two wine coolers from the Yeti stashed in the back seat, and took a deep breath—

And I told her about a town that didn’t exist.

PRUDENCE DIDN’T BELIEVE ME AT FIRST. SHE THOUGHT EITHERI’d hallucinated a lot of it, or what hadactuallyhappened was so heartbreaking that my brain came up with a new story. At least, not until I went on my first date since Liam a month and a half later, during the first days of the fall semester. The man was handsome, and he taught English in the same department as me—and the second he showed up at my apartment and saw my bookshelf, he laughed.

“You turn them around when guests come over, right?” he asked, motioning to the sanguine embraces and lusty women across the covers. He plucked one off the shelf—a vintage-looking bodice ripper with Jason Baca on the cover, inches away from dragging his tongue across the woman’s neck. “This Fabio’s not exactly a Chuck Palahniuk.”

“That’s not Fabio.”

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